Foundation
by sutaretagaisce
Summary: YukiHaru: Even those who have a semblance of perfection need something good to build themselves upon...


Yuki always assumed there to be a hierarchy in life. It seemed predisposed for humans in large groups to select someone as a figurehead. People need someone to adore, and someone to take the blame if anything ever went wrong. If not a person willing to sacrifice them for the group, then something intangible that did not object to such fixation while maintaining a presence in the worshipful congregation's miserable lives. Gods were imaginary and their aims were mysterious, Yuki knew for a fact, because gods did not exist and if they did it would not matter to do anything because it was beneath their interests.  
  
His own family had elected such a person to lead them through the troubled days of their curse. The god of the Souma family was Akito. He abused his power recklessly, arbitrarily...viciously. Sometimes it seemed as if he set out to do something that purposefully contradicted any progress he wanted prior to that. His whims were incalculable to the profiles of Machiavelli and Sun Yat-sen. The diseased headmaster didn't even fit the role of someone completely self-serving. It had gotten to the point where every one of the Jyuunishi thought he was mad, that the destiny of his long and torturous death was what drove him insane. They still followed him blindly though, despite the obvious detriment it caused, because there was no other way than their ancestral hierarchy.  
  
But Yuki knew Akito best out of everyone in the world. He was the pet of the god, the figurehead that could be touched and could be hurt by those who the god hurt. Yuki would be the bearer of his will. He was the symbol of the only thing that made Akito less than a god, because that need to abuse his connection was admission that Akito needed him and the other Jyuunishi for his power. And how fitting it was to set the cursed soul who was the ancestral symbol of leadership, the clever rat whose wits granted him the first year in the zodiac cycle, be laid supine for the sake of order, for his whims. For his calculated madness.  
  
That was why Akito chose to love him-because gods can choose who they love and humans can't-out of all the others. It was the most divine torture.  
  
Yuki knew he was human, although he tried to deny it. For a very long time he even emulated Akito in some desperate gamble to defend himself from the hatred of the other Jyuunishi. But he couldn't bring himself to completely give himself to the visage, the horrible cruelty that seemed to be his god's only medicine. So he kept himself apart, not a god, not a leader, nothing but a cold ritual that represented what stood behind him.  
  
To say that Tohru changed that in him isn't entirely false, just very generalized. She was the most noticeable step in a process. But the hardest shift in his set caste, from being the distant prince in title to one who cared to be so in name, was not resultant from the pauper girl who was so perfect she had to be a princess in disguise. It came from the negligible boy often forgotten in his mediocrity, not completely destitute, and yet not noble enough to catch anyone's interest who did not pay close attention. The one who was ordained to follow behind him.  
  
For someone who was the blessed child of the Jyuunishi, it was ironic that he received beatings from his mother, shunning from his older brother, and a father who only gave him the curse of being "blessed" in who he was. The others who shared in his curse found no sympathy for him. After all, he was loved by their leader, favored by their god. The outcast of the Soumas, Kyou, immediately began to cultivate a hate for him, thinking him responsible for his low status. Yuki hated the cat for that, for thinking that it was his fault and his blame for destiny. For wanting the life that made a little boy cry endless nights alone, begging not to be a prince, a leader, a status, a symbol. He didn't want to be adored, or loathed, or seen. Just to exist, as himself, alone.  
  
Then one day he was sitting silently wishing he could look out his window. Akito had forbade him to stare out at the world Yuki could not be a part of because he was supposed to represent it and not live it. A young boy who he had only known from New Year's Days came from the world and began to rail at him.  
  
"I hate you, stupid rat! It's your fault! It's your fault people think I'm stupid! They all laugh at me and call me a slow-witted cow! And it's all your fault! I hate you so much!"  
  
"Are you stupid?" Yuki asked quietly. In retrospect it was much like what Akito would say, except he did not expect anything from a response. It was not any sense of superiority, merely the fact that Yuki felt he was shoved into a place in life that never had any interaction with the levels apart from him.  
  
"No..." the boy said, almost surprised at himself, as if the thought had never occurred to him. "I'm not."  
  
"Then why should you listen to them?" Yuki felt his heart flutter unexpectedly. That did not sound like words a god would say through him. They were altogether foreign and strangely comforting. No crowd could induce him to speak in anything but as the mediating force for their collective consciousness. But, even though leaders became something greater than themselves for the sake of many, Yuki had always felt lost because he never had something to be based on that could attempt to become greater. Yet, one person gave him the opportunity to see who he was, a boy borne of the same frustration to be something different than what the world expected, to be anything at all.  
  
Hatsuharu Souma went away with changed expectations, and a newly kindled fondness for the quiet boy who did not assume what the rest of the world believed to be true. Because Yuki Souma was not part of the world that maligned him, his words were sanctuary in the heart of the boy. Later, he would confess to himself that the first conversation they had was what made Yuki his first love, his first glimpse of kindness that he felt was unattainable, but still beautiful in admiring. For the same thing that made Yuki the cause of his initial hatred, the unexpected shelter of his self- image, also made him forever impossible to grasp. Yuki could not change that, because even though he cared for Haru because he had given Yuki a sense of himself, more than the cursed rat, more than the protege of Akito, more than a prince and a leader, he gave him something to be greater than what Haru let him have. So he could not return what Haru gave to him. The younger boy understood that, and loved him regardless of the fact.  
  
So Yuki began to build himself as a perfect figurehead; flawlessly kind, charming, intelligent, and forever self-sacrificing. It was still an act, because even though Yuki now had something to hold onto himself as innately him, he still had gone so long as a symbol of something else. Later in life others would give him the courage to combine the two and become a person, whole and flawed, yet himself. But he would always carry those roles, and they would always make him hide part of himself. And beneath all the layers of sacrifice for the greater good of others and their needs, the part that was solely Yuki-the one he kept sacred and immovable as his cornerstone of himself-found he had loved Haru in return. 


End file.
